Harvests of Sorrow / Les moissons de la tristesse

A carefully arranged, scenographic space evokes feelings of nostalgia. It interrupts linear time, connecting the recent past with previous years, even decades.

Emo* is back? Maybe it has never left? It only hid, transformed, and began to function under different names, attaching itself to successive aesthetic trends, changing its forms (not to be confused with Goth). Don’t worry, they will not vanish into the depths of the Internet, even though, amid the abundance of content, you often cannot find that one thing you saw once and then lost, while other things you keep encountering far too often.

All aesthetics will continue to be rediscovered again and again. Artificially driven, like the two fake Mugler stars displayed in the exhibition — find the third one, the original.

It circulates, circulates, circulates,
Cycle, cycle, cycle.
Core, core, core.

“Everything is the sequel to the sequel to the sequel. Everything is the copy of the copy of the copy. Everything is a pop song […] Haunted by its own past”
(Bruno Jacoby, Loops 1.0)

Cinema hall, the deconstructed seats look contemporary. They were meant to come from Neptun Cinema: blue, with upholstery reminiscent of bus seats. Sentimental.

This film can be anything: a sad story, a romantic tale, a new wave, and a wave from the Baltic Sea. The details are hidden in small objects. There are signs everywhere for those with eyes to see.

The liminal space of the exhibition or perhaps, after all, a prop room is suspended between films, memories, and aesthetics. In an incomplete arrangement. A place to pass through, or to stop and immerse oneself.

The emotional landscape has taken the form of objects — memento. Souvenirs of never-ending melancholy. Alexis Puget chooses a poetic form for presenting internet references. At the same time, he creates an archive that is both personal and collective, full of cultural references and nuances. Drawing inspiration from meteorological phenomena, cinema without image and sound, Romanticism, found footage, nocturnal animals, and online micro-communities, he filters this multitude of phenomena through a personal, sensitive approach. From an excess of stimuli, he selects and translates them into precise physical installations, complemented by analogue objects.

Geert Lovink frames the internet’s current state as one of permacrisis: a permanent condition of stagnation, rage, and numbness, where algorithmic manipulation, AI slop, platform enshittification, and techno-feudalism define everyday life. He labels the dominant emotional landscape as copium — a metaphorical opiate for digital despair, numbing users trapped in endless loops of scrolling, doom, and distraction.

Alexis Puget repeatedly refers to the emotional landscape of the present. His practice and way of thinking grow out of a critique of new media, one that maps the states of isolation, insomnia, exhaustion, and numbness produced by platforms. At the same time, his approach consists in extracting fragments of aesthetic trends and translating them into the language of art, without the need to construct long, essayistic, or moralizing narratives. With greater distance, and at times also with humor, he diagnoses the present and its realities.

“We would rather go extinct than go offline” (G. Lovink) could easily appear on another of the artist’s T-shirts as a bitter truism. Perhaps we have already reached a point at which new media have been sufficiently analyzed and named, and our fatigue has reached its peak — while the pace of production of images, content, and affects continues to accelerate. In this tension between exhaustion and overproduction, Puget’s works do not offer an unequivocal critique, but rather a fragmentary record of the state in which we function.

Let’s take a closer look. After all, we are all users with hurricane brain.

* Emo is the name of a subculture that emerged in the 1980s and returned in the 2000s. Initially associated with rock / hardcore punk music and emotionally charged lyrics, it later became linked to a distinctive style of clothing, makeup, and hairstyle.

* The “-core” internet slang suffix denotes a specific aesthetic, vibe, or subculture, often highlighting a hyper-focused, niche theme. Originating from hardcore punk, it became a popular way to categorize internet aesthetics (e.g., cottagecore, normcore) on social media, often focusing on shared visuals or lifestyle themes. (Wikipedia)